We are now about four weeks into dragonfly season here in Ottawa and my dragonfly woes continue. There just don’t seem to be the number of individuals present as there should be. On June 3rd I visited Andrew Haydon Park to see if there were more odes flying there. While there were plenty of teneral damselflies in the vegetation – too fresh and colourless to properly identify – I only saw three dragonflies. Not three species – three individuals. One was a Common Whitetail that escaped my camera. The other two were Common Green Darners laying eggs in the pond that didn’t. I walked around the two ponds and checked the eastern creek and the small beach at the mouth of Graham Creek (which was almost non-existent due to high water levels) but did not find nearly the number of dragonflies that I was expecting.
That afternoon I went to Sarsaparilla Trail to see if the baskettails were finally flying. I hadn’t seen any large baskettail emergences since the day at Heaphy Road, and I still had yet to see an American Emerald this year. To my disappointment I didn’t see any emeralds, but at least there were a few skimmers at the boardwalk!
There were a couple of Dot-tailed Whitefaces, Common Green Darners, and a Four-spotted Skimmer, but little else…no Belted Whitefaces, and no king skimmers. I saw a Chalk-fronted Corporal in a clearing in the woods but so far there was no sign of the mass emergence I usually see here each spring.
On June 5th I visited Jack Pine Trail at lunch in the hopes of finding some emeralds flying along the trails. I found two high-flying baskettails at the back of the trail system and a fresh Dot-tailed Whiteface at spiketail creek. Again, three individuals total, with no damselflies at all.
I’ve been hoping to visit Mud Lake for a while to check on the season’s progress there. The habitat is too large to visit on a lunch hour, so I went after work on June 8th. I scanned the lake, hoping to see the surface shimmering with the flash of dragonfly wings…and saw maybe two or three. From the parking area I headed east along the shore, checking the openings and finding a few Common Green Darners in flight and Dot-tailed Whitefaces on lily pads and in the vegetation. I was hoping to see some Spiny Baskettails or Horned Clubtails but did not. There were, however, plenty of bluets in the vegetation, which made me happy to see even though I forgot to bring my loupe to identify them.
A few emeralds were flying over the lawn just south of the filtration plant. I caught one, which turned out to be a Racket-tailed Emerald, and saw two Common Baskettails gliding overhead, just beyond the reach of my net. Then I spotted a dragonfly flying in the shadows of the opening onto the northeast corner of the pond just where the flooding typically begins. It was flying low enough to catch, and when I pulled the dragonfly out of my net I looked at it in bafflement for a moment as I was completely expecting an emerald and saw this instead:
The thoracic stripes reminded me of a cruiser or spiketail but the abdominal pattern was brown and blue….then it clicked that I was looking at a Springtime Darner, a species I see only a couple of times a year and never at Mud Lake! This was my best find so far this season and I was delighted. Although it looks like a mosaic darner, it is not a member of genus Aeshna. It is smaller, has a much earlier flight season, and the paired blue spots along the abdomen are outlined with black. I placed it on a branch and got a couple of photos before it flew away.
Thinking my luck had finally changed, I returned to Sarsaparilla Trail at lunch on Friday, June 12th. There were a few new additions, but nothing exciting: a Racket-tailed Emerald at the boardwalk, and a couple of Taiga Bluets and a Sedge Sprite in the vegetation near the bench at the boardwalk entrance.
While I was encouraged to see a few more species, I was still disappointed there were so few individuals present in total, and that this was happening everywhere that I’ve visited so far. However, the weather is going to be beautiful tomorrow, so I can’t wait to go further afield and see what is happening in other habitats!
OdoNotations 